Complementary Methods for Research in Education

Edited by

Richard M. Jaeger

American Educational Research Association

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Philosophical Inquiry Methods in Education

Michael Scriven University of Western Australia

Background: The Relation of Philosophy to Education

There has always been a small but sturdy band of distinguished scholars strad­dling the fields of philosophy and education. In the Western tradition, one thinks immediately of Plato and Rousseau and Dewey who were philosophers first and most famously, and educators later-though it would be more accurate w regard the activities as intertWined. Without any expert historical knowledge it is easy co mention a good many more, from Whitehead and Russell to Suppes and Peters.

Now, why is this scholarly connection between philosophy and education so strong? You cannot run off a string of names of chemists or mathematicians or linguists who have made the same kind of contribution to education. Why not? Why indeed docs philosaphy of education get into many "foundations" courses in schools of education?

The word "philosophy" comes from the Greek and means "love of knowl­cdgc"-not just knowledge about any one thing, but knowledge itself, the whole of it. People who care about a very wide range of knowledge arc, in that respect, generalists rather than specialists. I think that to a limited extent philos­ophy still draws in generalists; and people with wide-ranging interests arc more l;kcly to contribute to fields other than the one in which they receive their first training. Hence philosophers-more than scientists, who arc more prone to specializing-are likely to contribute to fields which are not primary fields of academic research training: to education, for example, and to other subjects.

Parenthetically, it might be noted that mathematics and the sciences them­sdves have benefited enormously from the work of philosophers; originally, of course, most sciences sprang from philosophical work. It must also be added that much of the academic tradition in philosophy has run in the opposite di­rection: the subject that should be concerned with all knowledge has frantically tried to make itself into a haven for specialists.

Another reason for the overlap of philosophy and education is that, while educators arc concerned with methods for imparting knowledge, philosophers arc professionally concerned with the concept of knowledge itself. The entire subdiscipline known as epistemology is concerned simply with that notion. Educators, in looking at teaching methods and theories about how to impart

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132 COMPLEMENTARY METHODS

knowledge, naturally want to begin with a sound understanding .~nd definition of knowledge itself; and getting such a definition requires quite an excursion into philosophy. On such excursions one is likely to meet philosophers and in­terest them in one's special problem. So the connection through a common interest in knowledge is an important one. The s:tme line of argument can be provided with respect to the area of ethics and the aims of life-a key philo­sophical area, and also one where the educator and the educational theorist are vitally interested in trying to provide direction and proper procedures for the enterprise of education. Thus there are two professional parties involved in

many of these problems from education. Each of these parties-the philosopher and the educator-learns something

from the other. The philosopher gets hints about what knowledge is from study­ing the learning and teaching process, which shows what actually counts as knowledge in the practical context. And the educator picks up suggestions about what knowledge is, but perhaps more importantly, is not, by listening to philosophers make distinctions or clarify the relationships between knowledge, on the one hand, and instincts or attitudes or skills or habits or feelings, on the other; and between learning on the one hand and experiencing or living or

changing or trying on the other. Thus the philosopher analyzes many of the complex concepts which educa-

tional researchers study from a scientific or historical point of view. Researchers who arc interested in moral education, for example, will first have to get clear about how to define moral education, and how to distinguish it from education in manners, conventions (which are not the same as manners), or prudence, or in cognitive knowledge of the content of moral codes. If the researcher becomes interested in, say, multicultural awareness, philosophiLal analysis can help clarify the basic concept of multicultural awareness itself by sorting out and bringing in other work on such notions as empathy, sympathy, understanding, and l'mU·

hen, as well as bare knowledge of other cultures. This paper is intended to document the need for educational researchers to

have in their repertoire well-developed skills in conceptual analysis, one crucial part of philosophical expertise, and to explicate some of the methods of concep· tual analysis, by example and by description. Finally, it suggests ways to acquire

training in these skills. The Crucial Role of Conceptual Analysis

Many researchers have thought that the first part of their job-analysis of the concepts that are going to be studied-could be done, or could be done better, without any help from philosophers. That path is paved with major disasters. Once in a while such researchers have been lucky, and once in a while they hai'C been sufficiently good at conceptual analysis anyway to be able to do the job themselves. Usually, they simply lack the skills to keep out of trouble and they finish up with definitions that include many things they themselves wanted to exclude, and exclude things they wanted to include. The student, indeed the author of such definitions, is understandably confused by these attempts. But

PHILOSOPillCAL INQUIRY METHODS 133

that js not to say that turning to some philosopher when you are doing the philosophical analysis always pays off. Many philosophers have no interest at all in applied conceptual analysis of this kind. Others do it well, but only in some subject-matter areas such as physics or mathematics. Still others have interest but Jack the talent. Much the best solution lies in training educational research­ers to a reasonable level of competence in conceptual analysis.

It is true that the same might be said about training in historical and histo­riographical analysis and in the various other methodologies which are dis­cussed in other parts of this book. There really isn't any shortcut to competence in educational research. Rather, more skills are required in educational research than in most subjects, ·essentially because it is an applied field that involves more component disciplines than most subjects. The attempt, during the middle third of this century, to convert the subject into applied social science has only suc­ceeded in demonstrating that it is more than that, and that applied social science research is itself all too often conceptually ill-founded.

It has been very encouraging in the past few decades to see the number of philosophers who have been doing analytical work in education; not just teach­ing, but publishing articles and texts. One thinks particularly of R. S. Peters, Israel Scheffler, and D. ]. O'Connor, bur there arc also many others doing work of very high quality. An example of this latter group is Anthony Flew, with his most valuable discussions of the distinction between education and propaganda or brainwashing (sec, e.g., Flew, 1972). Nevertheless, it is still the case in the United States (somewhat less so in Canada and Great Britain) that educational rcscarchcrs' academic preparation is very often devoid of serious training in philosophical analysis.

Educational researchers' courses of study may well have included something cillcd kPhilosophy of Ed," usually in the undergraduate curriculum. However, that subject is usually quite different from what we are talking about. It usually comprises a review of normative theories about the ideal form of education. (There arc some guite good but entirely independent arguments for including rhat in every researcher's training.) Only rarely is philosophy of education made into a course in philosophical analysis, and still more rarely is an advanced ver­sion of it required for the graduate degree. In irs usual form it is really part of the history of thought-the history of extremely general theories about the ideal nature of education, taught in a way analogous to political philosophy.

Using a distinction that emerged in the philosophy of history, we can say that there is a major difference between speculative philosophy of education and ana­lyric philosophy of education. A course in speculative philosophy of politics, history, or education could surely enlarge the vision and sharpen the thinking of researchers, but it may involve very little explicit training in analysis or ana­~1ic techniques. Though it might involve such training, and will be a better cou_rsc if such training is included, there is always a time cost involved in such lJJ mclusion, a cost that translates to a loss of coverage of the desired range of historical or speculative topics.

It IS a mistake to argue that every researcher in the subject field X must have

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134 COMPLEMENTARY METHODS

extensive training in the philosophy of X, because the philosophy of any subject is a massive subspecialty and the economy of time doesn't really allow coverage of everything of that kind; i.e., everything that is related in some quite serious way to the primary research field. What we do argue here is that basic training in conceptual analysis is absolutely fundamental for researchers in education, for exactly the same reasons that statistical training is fundamental if they intend to do large-scale empirical studies such as survey or experimental work. The differ­ence is only that the need for conceptual analysis applies to every kind of edu­cational research, not just to one subarea.

That it applies to those doing statistical work is obvious from the grotesque blunders that have been and are being made as a result of confusing statistical significance with educational significance. Most studies were-and to a ridicu­lous extent still are-content to report on significance level as if that somehow guaranteed (was a sufficient condition for) educational significance, whereas it is obvious that it is at most an occasionall_v necessary condition for it. What is needed beyond the significance test, to avoid triviality, is an extensive discussion of the relation of the absolute size of the treatment effect, once it has been shown to be more than one could expect by chance, to the needs assessment data (if any­one has bothered to acquire any), and preferably also to comparable data for a number of alternatives. Without this further discussion, a study is always incom­petent and its results are usually trivial. The fact that there turns out to be a "highly significant" (e.g., statistically significant at the .0005 level) relationship between watching Sesame Street and learning to read is of absolutely zero edu­cationa!JsociaUpolicy significance. The only possible way in which the study that generated such results could be of any serious interest is if it shows that some completely different conditions are met; for example. rhat the absolute size of the reading achievement gains is substantially larger than the kind of gains ob­tained from comparably costly/enjoyable alternative procedures, including, but not limited to, standard reading programs. Even more is needed: for example, it must be shown that the size of these gains is large enough to make a substan­tial contribution to the reading skills deficit of those children served. Here is where the needs assessment data come in, along with all sorts of questions that make quantitative researchers nervous, such as how to decide what to count as "substantial," or how to distinguish needs from wants and ideals. These arc the inescapable fundamental questions; without answers to them, there is no way to know what research is worth doing, even for intellectual payoffs, let alone socially valuable ones. And they arc, of course, philosophicaUanalytical ques­tions, not statisticaUanalytical ones.

The substitution of statistical for evaluative criteria of significance is a blun­der whose consequences included the trivialization of a very great deal, perhaps most, of educational research in most of this century. And it is a blunder that can be avoided by researchers with serious training in conceptual analysis.

It is not the only blunder of this kind that atlccts statistical work; the very choice and interpretation of different significance levels, within their proper field of use, involves deep and ill-thought-out assumptions, as the literature on "the

PHIL()SOPHICAL INQUIRY METHODS 135

significance test controversy" amply demonstrates-but few researchers are even familiar with the main points in that literature. When should you pick which significance level? Under what circumstances are none of the usual levels ade­quate? Can one ever make plausible the move from the rejection of the null

. hypothesis to the acceptance of a particular explanation? (The latest contribu­tions to this discussion are easily accessible through a keyword search of Psycho­wgical Abstracts, and perhaps other social science databases via Dialog, Lock­heed's online database collection, accessible from your nearest library. An excellent anthology reprinting the original papers of a few years back is The Significance Test Controversy [Morrison & Henkel, 1970 ]. )

In the tests and measurement area, a dozen new conceptual problems arise. A list of examples would have to include: the aptitude/achievement distinction {so often rejected on the attractive but conceptually superficial grounds that any measurement of aptitude is a measurement of achievement); the intelligence test controversy; the difficult and shaded distinction between reading and reasoning; rhc key notion of bias; the Fallacy of Definitional Irresponsibility-the idea that one can define concepts in any way that seems appropriate or convenient. (This last problem will be discussed in a later section of this paper.)

Once we move away from the self-styled "scientific" area of educational re­search to naturalistic or historical studies or policy studies, the need for concep­tual analysis skills becomes even greater. Concepts of causation and explanation, of intention, of meaning, and of valuing become crucial and involve quite so­phisticated conceptual analysis. There is no need to wallow in the vast philo­sophical literature devoted to each of these topics, as long as you know enough of the basic logical analysis to avoid the crucial traps; and exactly that kind of help is what a well-trained philosopher in an education department should be able to provide. And provide at the graduate and faculty level, not just in a rev\ew of speculative philosophies of education to the undergraduates.

Explaining the Lack of 'fraining in Conceptual Analysis

All this seems obvious enough. Why is so little of it done? Why do we con­tinue with this deficiency in conceptual-analytic training in virtually all pro­grams for training educational researchers?

One possible explanation for this continued acceptance of deficient prepara­tion is education's search for stltus as a social science, a search which automat­ically dooms a program to the essential weaknesses of most social science pro­grams-incompetence in conceptual analysis; overemphasis on mindless data collection, numerical analysis, and the hypothesis-testing model; and eschewal of evaluative investigations. One must therefore ask what it is that misleads both social science graduate programs and educational ones.

All roo often, and for no good reason, the social sciences arc themselves playing catch-up-in this case, with the physicaUbiological sciences. They arc engaged in their own mistaken search for status. One must, I think, conclude that the villain of the piece is a very simple-minded conception of the nature of science. This leads to trouble in the procedures for training researchers and,

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136 COMPLEMENTARY METHODS

consequently, to trouble in the practice of educational research. The error-and of course it is another conceptual error-is that of supposing science to be as it is described in the so-called empiricist tradition. (More accurately, this position should not be called the empiricist tradition, but the nco-positivist conception of science.) ·

Understanding why so little training in conceptual analysis is offered may be one of the most useful aids to avoiding the same mistake in one's own career choices or in the presuppositions of the training program with which one is associated. The two are closely linked: the same factors that lead to the prepa­ration of conceptually incompetent researchers explain the rash tendency of re­searchers to rush into building a lifetime of research on a foundation of concep­tual sand. You might, for example, build a lifetime of research on the teaching process upon a weak analysis of what teaching itself is. Teaching is, in fact, a very difficult notion to define, and if you decide that you can define it any way you like or if you think it is a very simple notion to analyze, you will finish up doing a great deal of research on a process which is definitely not teaching, and is only related to it in some obscure way. In short, your research will be useless for any practical concerns, such as the improvement of teaching, and for any theoretical concerns since, as you have defined teaching, its relevance to any understanding of the phenomena that people are trying to explain in working on a theory of teaching is not clear. The simpler efforts of this kind involve identifYing teaching with didactic presentation or the production of brning or the transfer of information; but the hard parts get us into the distinction be­tween teaching and indoctrinating-the problem of circumscribing the affective component of legitimate teaching. Very little significant work can be done on teaching without a satisfactory analysis of the concept.

False Doctrines About Conceptual Analysis

Two doctrines are often thought, with considerable justification, to be key components of conceptual analysis. One of these is the doctrine that the correct way to define terms in science is to usc so-called "operational definitions"-that is, the kind of definition which equates a concept with the results of certain measurements. The laudable idea behind this approach is to ensure that we pin down the meaning of any term we use in a way that will eliminate vagueness and, in particular, to connect the language of science with the operations of science-measurements. Thus the opcrationalist approach maintains that all concepts should be defined in terms ofthe measurements (operations) that will be used to determine their presence and magnitude.

The other doctrine is that of linguistic arbitrariness, or, more specifically, one interpretation of it that was referred to above as the Fallacy of Definitional Irresponsibility. That term is here used to refer to the idea that it is "just a matter of convention" how terms are defined. In this view, definitions are mmtia/l_y arbitrary though certainly not capricious. The definition is thoughtfully pro­posed and appears reasonable to the proposer. However, it is, unlike claims about the connection between, for example, mass and gravity, which is a matter

PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY METHODS 137

f cmpi"rical fact, not something to be settled by definition. You cannot define 0 waY the force of gravity that operates between bodies with a finite mass. But it

as d~ought that you can define any other concept you like in any way that suits 1,0urself. The combination of these two doctrines offered a neat way to end-run

~onceptual analysis. After all, if linguistic labels are arbitrary-and they certainly arc artifacts (that is, they arc merely the product of human endeavor, not part of the original furniture of the world)-we can avoid trying to analyze messy old shopworn concepts, and start afresh. Moreover, we can use the method of operational definition when replacing these old concepts, thereby ensuring a really useful language, one which is unambiguous and tied precisely to scientific measurement.

The social sciences especially were-and still are-impressed with these two doctrines. Since it is the social sciences that constitute the role models for most educational research, it is hardly surprising that conceptual analysis has not been seen as particularly important to educational research and in the training of educational researchers.

But when we look closely at the evidence, the initial plausibility of these two planks in the n_e?positivist platform begins to ev~porat~. In the first place, op­erational definmons turned out to be a great dtsappomtmenr. It was not so rnuch that one could not create operational definitions of scientific concepts (it is not roo hard to make them up) but that nobody cared about them; nobody wanted them; nobody would usc them. They were not recognized as helpful or even accurate accounts of existing concepts they were supposed to define, and that hardly gave one any confidence about how they would reflect new concepts. Even Percy Bridgman, the Harvard low-temperature physicist who came up with the whole idea, cooled off on operational definitions considerably. And people in psychology, for example, who tried them out ran into unexpected resistance. Was this just the resistance of conservatism, the inertia of those who had grown up with the untidy old concepts and who were unwilling to drop them for newer, cleaner ones?

At first it seemed as if that might be the trouble; the young Turks of the new movement of operationalism certainly thought so. But gradually we came to realize that the whole approach was based on a fallacy, and that the fallacy was essentially a misinterpretation of the doctrine of linguistic arbitrariness. When you interpret that ambiguous phrase-linguistic arbitrariness-with care, then it turns our that under one interpretation it is true, but on that interpretation it will not support the usc of operational definitions. And if you interpret it so as to support them, it turns out that you no longer have a sensible doctrine.

Before I discuss these two interpretations, let me call your artention once more to the fact that we are now doing conceptual analysis. This chapter is not a long-winded historical introduction to some examples; it is an example. And we are not only analyzing the concept of definition itself, which is a key tool in any kind of research and, hence, in educational research, but also looking into the nature of language-in particular, the sense in which it can be said to be arbitrary. That is a key substantive question in understanding language and Ian-

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138 COMPLEMENTARY METHODS

guage learning, which are the vehicles for most education and the subject of great deal of educational research. a

Back to the question of legitimate and illegitimate interpretations of the doc. trine of linguistic arbitrariness. Language is arbitrary in the sense that German and Japanese and Spanish, and so on, all do a fine job in communicating ideas and are totally different. So there is some sense in which the world does no; define what language has to be used in describing it; we do that defining; We create those languages. Moreover, these languages emerge in their respective cultures entirely as a result of the language building and language learning ac. tivities of those societies and individuals, not as a result of some law connecting the local climate or crops or social structure with language forms. Languages are obviously arbitrary in the sense of being conventions rather than laws of nature.

The General Irrelevance of Redefinition

All that, however, is not to say that these languages are nuw arbitrary. They now have very strict rules, and if you take any one term from any one of them and give it a new definition, you will not be speaking that language-just as you will not be playing chess if you say that a castle can move diagonally. There is nothing about the shape of castles that makes it a law of nature that they cannot move diagonally; but what was arbitrary once is no longer so. Of course, you can make up a new chess variant or an entirely new game with the same pieces. Then the crucial question is, why would anybody want to play with you? You say, because it is simpler and cleaner and clearer than chess; it has simpler rules. Who cares? We can always play checkers or dice or heartS, if we want something simpler than chess. But chess players want solutions to chess prob­lems, not to other problems. Language speakers want solutions to the problems they express in their language-and which have equivalent relevance to the problems in questions. Behind the arbitrariness of language there is the reality which they all describe, the reality of sorrow and love and anxiety, of leaming and teaching and explaining, the reality which psychology and c;ducational re­search are trying to understand. Redefinition of these concepts makes no con­tribution to understanding them. It is as useless a contribution to solving the problems as redefining the moves of chess pieces is to solving chess problems.

For that matter, we could always talk "baby talk"; it is much simpler than "grown-up talk." But why should we? Baby talk lacks the strength to do the job-make the distinctions, name the crucial phenomena-that the adult lan­guage does, and why settle for less than that? In educational as in any other kind of research you can always go off into a comer and play your own little game, but your results will have no known connections with the problems of humanity or of researchers trying to understand the phenomena of human behavior. Those are problems in any language, whether it is French, German or Spanish. They are problems about the reality which is reflected in the concepts embedded in ev~ry mature language, and redefining those concepts is just a sidetracking exerctse.

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PHILOSOPillCAL INQUIRY METHODS 139

5o th!= dilemma that faced researchers in the empiricist or positivist tradition was that they could give a nice operational definition of anxiety, for example, as

hatever the Taylor scale measured. But then it turned out that the Taylor scale ;OCS not discriminate between anxiety and, let us say, hostility. What should we do then? We can say that that proves the Taylor scale is no gOO<i, because it does · ot measure anxiety in the usual sense of that term, or we can say that we have ~defined anxiety in terms of the Taylor scale, and what we have just discovered ·s simply a fact about anxiety in this new sense. This latter strategy, which we ~ght call the "brazen-it-out" strategy, obviously raises the question of why anybody should bother to investigate "Tayloriety" -the Taylor version of anx-

iety. · · Moreover, it raises the second question of why the researcher has confused

rnatters by using the preexisting word instead of a new word, like Tayloriety. If you reply by saying that the scale measures something close to anxiety in the old sense, and that is why you stayed with the old term, you next have to face the problem that you do not know exactly how close it is. In particular, does it get to the heart of the notion, from the point of view of the psychodynamics (and hence psychotherapy), or the understanding of function impairment? For eXample, you have just discovered one divergence and can hardly deny that there rnay be many others. Hence it will never be clear whether we shou~ treat your rtSults as artificial products of your arbitrary definition, or as real discoveries about anxiety-the concept as we understand it. Who wants to get into that kind of mess? Who wants to spend time on doing research of unknown signifi­cance?

The Exceptional Case

There is one move you can make at this point which would save the day. It is a very difficult move to pull off, and only very rarely has it been done; in the educational area, virtually never. Moreover, people do not realize its significance and its difficulty; and they quote examples where it did not work, as if they support the general practice of convenient redefinition of scientific or of every­day terms. They have failed to notice the greater part of the iceberg. In these cases of giving a nice clean definition of some concept that previously existed, the move that saves you from disaster, from doing research which nobody is going to be interested in because they do not know how to interpret the results because you are speaking your own language and not theirs, involves proving that your redefined concept is better than the one it replaces.

What does it mean to say that a concept is a better one? Well, "clearer" and "simpler to apply" are part of what is meant by "better," so the operational definitions have that going for them. But the hard part is the rest of it. The hard pan is to show, other things being equal, that the supposedly better concept can, in fact, make the main distinctions that were marked by the previous con­cept-and that, of course, is where the Taylor scale of anxiety gets into trouble. Tayloriety cannot be distinguished from hostility, but anxiety can be distin­guished from hostility and, indeed, rather easily. So, Tayloriety cannot be as

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140 CO~LRMENTARYMETHODS

close to the concept of anxiety as its supporters maintained. It is different in a major and clear way. It would be risky, unnecessarily risky, to bother with it.

When Skinner defined thirst as "the propensity to drink when water is made available;' he was offering a nice simple substitute for the prior notion-but not a good substitute, because it is obvious that someone with a gun at his back WiU drink when not thirsty, and some people with, as they say, a "great thirst" are not interested in water. So you are trying to trade off simplicity for reasonable accuracy in mapping the original concept-a dangerous trade. These two ex­amples, which come from the behaviorist/empiricist/positivist tradition, show you just how crude those trade-offs were. And they turned out, as further in­stances of their inadequacy emerged-to be very poor substitutes for the original notions. People were simply not willing to risk the time investment involved in working on them. That track record is the key reason why someone who cares about evidence in assessing hypotheses-the self-defining feature of the empir­icist-must abandon the move for redefinition and turn instead to the hard work of conceptual analysis of the existing concepts.

The people who favored the move towards operationalise redefinitions had had virtually no training in the capacity to analyze the prior concept, so they really had no way in which to make the key test of the superiority of their proposed simplification. They just favored it because it was new and simpler, and they ftlt that the messiness of the old concept was an impediment to re­search (it was) and probably reflected many confusions of people with unscien­tific training (it probably did) and hence had no redeeming fearures-which is where they made their mistake. For the messy concept contains all the subtlety that experience has forced upon it; it reflects the real phenomena, perhaps not clearly but usually rather comprehensively. Since the most important part of science is accurate reflection of reality, this part of the matter cannot be dis­missed lightly. So, although some limited trades of simplicity for accuraq· arc possible, yon have to do the homework first-or be very lucky.

As was said before, there have been some cases whc,rc this trade-off really is worthwhile, where in fact the redefinition pays off. One of them is of great interest to educational researchers. To define intelligence in terms of the score of an IQ test either docs this trick or comes very close to it. It's not an example that educational researchers or psychologists like to be reminded about, and it's not one they have defended with much skill when it came under attack, mainly because they rarely had any understanding of just what the merits of this case were. The key point in the defense of the use of the IQ test as a measure of intelligence-the part that few people know about-is the claim that the IQ score correlates better with the average of the judgments of several experienced teachers of a given pupil than those judgments do with each otl1er. Thus, the key point in the defense of the IQ test is not that it is simpler than the usual rather murky concept of intelligence, not that it provides an operational defini­tion of IQ, not that it is quantitative, but just that it is a better indicator of intelligence than the judgment of the average well-placed evaluator.

Of course, it won't always be better than the judgments of every such evalu-

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PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY METHODS 141

tor; for one thing, that's a standard that is not met by any human evaluator. :r's just '(allegedly) better in more cases than any identifiable type of human valuator, and hence, even if there are some evaluators that are better, most ~ople will not have access to them, leaving the test as the only thing that most

people can use. Now if that claim about the IQ test is true-and the recent and well-justified

elimination of the relatively few class~ or race-contaminated items in many of the standard forms of the IQ test makes it more probable-then it certainly rnakes most of the distinctions that those teachers (or counselors or consulting psychologists) could consistently make. If the new concept is closer to the av­erage judgment of teachers who know a given individual, than any one of their judgments is to. that ~vcrage, th~n, of cour~e, any ~istinctions that ~~y are consistently making w1ll show up m the substitute notion-the IQ dcfimt1on of intelligence. So, one cannot attack it on the grounds that we used to attack Tayloricty. We will be in a position to meet that challenge. In addition, we have the added simplicity and applicability of a behaviorally defined notion.

No one has so far located a systematic error in the IQ definition of intelli­gence, apart from the aforementioned biases due to the social or racial group of the norming population, some of which have been corrected in revised test fonns. Of course, there are scores of fllleged systematic errors, and since the concept of intelligence is in disrepute, everyone has one or two of these in their conversational repertoire. There is no substantial evidence that these systematic errors have in fact been established. We simply do not have the studies to show there is any systematic superiority of any group of expert judges over the test. So here we have a real example of the operational definition representing an impro\'ement-ifthe key claim quoted above can in fact be supported. In all the debates, virtually no one has seen that this claim is the key to the scientific part of the issue, and that is what makes clear the lack of training in conceptual analysis.

Now, none of this settles the question of whether one should use IQ tests in schools, and for what purposes. It's perfectly clear that there have been plenty of inappropriate uses of them in the past, sometimes resulting in unfortunate penalties for children. Anyone who thinks that that is a good reason for drop­ping the use of the tests is sorely in need of training in conccprual analysis; and it is quite possible that 99 percent of the people who have given any thought to this issue in the past decade or two arc thus condemned. For the only issue is whether fewer children arc penalized when the IQ test is used than when it is not used. The original telling argument for school entry examinations was Dis­rae!i's plea that it would introduce some objectivity into a process that was ridclled with prejudice and, in particular, in those days in England, anti­Semitism. It's not at all clear that the reversion to teacher-based estimates of capability and performance will reduce the total amount of bias or simple error that will be involved in decisions about the placement and treatment of children. And no one seems to be treating this as a matter for investigation; we arc too busy expiating our guilt over the biases that were present in the tests to realize

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142 COMrLRMENTARYMrnTHODS

that jumping out of frying pans is not a guaranteed optimization strategy. So redefinition in the social sciences has occasionally been of benefit-but

not for reasons that anyone cares to remember when the pressure goes on. Nor are people clear exactly what reasons have to be provided in order to justify redefinition, namely evidence that nothing crucial is being lost in the way of distinctions and subsumptions that are currently important; and that something substantial is being gained in the way of simplification and/or the shedding of confusing implications or blurred distinctions. How does one establish that these conditions apply? Essentially by doing extensive and careful analysis of both the existing and the proposed definition; and to do that requires consid­erable skill in conceptual analysis.

The Conditions for Redefinition

It can also be said that a number of redefinitions have succeeded in the phys­ical sciences. The most interesting example, perhaps, is the way in which the concept of temperature has been redefined four times in the history of thermo­dynamics. In some redefinitions, the concept was identified with a new mea­surement, a fully operational definition. Each redefinition was theoretically fer­tile, theoretically interesting, because each of these redefinitions was involved in a restructuring of the whole science of thermodynamics and the concept of tem­perature was tied in to the new, basic concepts in each case. These redefinitions were sometimes operational; they were clear; they were theoretically interesting; and they did a very good job of matching the existing concept. They did not match the ultimate preexisting concept of ftlt temperature very well, but they were not meant to; they did match-and indeed surpassed-the existing con­cept of real temperature, which was best judged, prior to the introduction of thermometers, by getting a number of judges to make an estimate of tempera­ture. All of the thermodynamic definitions were immune to the well-known tricks that can be used to yield conflicting accounts of temperature from judges; and in addition each new notion was quantitative, sometimes that is always a bonus though not always the best alternative. Furthermore, the new notion covered a much longer scale range than the preexisting version and it yielded simple general physical laws. In short, the new temperature definition in each case did the IQ trick-it provided a better measure of temperature and lost little if anything.

Now, it is quite important to notice that these definitions of temperature had rather a short life; that is, after a few years or decades they were abandoned completely. How could that be the case, if they were redefined because the new definition was simpler-how could it cease to be simpler?

The new definitions were abandoned because in the light of increasing so· phistication in our analysis of temperature phenomena, they came to be seen as unsatisfactory. They came to be seen as nor matching the scientific concept of temperature as it was emerging and changing. What that tells you is something about the rest of the iceberg. It tells you that the true total meaning of temper­ature was never encapsulated in the operational definition. It tells you that, in

PHILOSOPIDCAL INQUIRY METHODS 143

fact, d}e referee for this :-vh~le game was invisible. It was the total linguistic nvironment of use by sc1ent1sts and others of the concept of temperature that ~ercrrnined whether each of the so-called operational definitions of temperature

'015 acceptable. 11

If it had been the sort of operational definition that the empiricists and pos-. ·ovists thought was possible, according to the doctrine of linguistic arbitrari· ~ess, then of course it could not possibly have been overthrown. It was simply something that had been made true by definition. However, it turned out not co be true by definition, but rather to be just a convenient shorthand. That is what simple definitions of important concepts always tum out to be; they are not really complete encapsulations of the meaning of these terms. They are simply convenient abbreviations for the meaning of them and they survive just as long as those abbreviations are, in fact, reasonably good matches to the total meaning of tl1e concept. Much of that meaning is, in science-not just in phys­ics, but in astronomy and chemistry and electronics-still in the common-sense background. This meaning is steadily developing, perhaps, but still there and nor abandoned when the new definition is coined. Changes with one or another science may lead us to change the thermodynamic definition but only as long as we preserve most of the old connections so that we can see that we are really still dealing with essentially the same concept. If you just looked at the defini­tions, which have almost no common clements, you would think that some radical shift of meaning had occurred; whereas in fact, what has occurred is a tidying up of one comer of the total network of meaning for this concept.

You will notice that these remarks on the development of definitions of terms in the physical sciences give a quite different picture from the "total reconstruc­tion" of meaning proposed by the naive philosophers of science in the empiri­cistlpositivist tradition. They give a picture of a great mass of meaning of these key concepts from which we crystallize out some simple form that serves us well as a substitute for most purposes, but not for the basic purpose of understand­ing the full meaning of the term. That understanding requires years of learning about all the meaning connections, and without that understanding one cannot come to see whether a new "definition" should be accepted pro tern. In any case, on this picture, it is "minor tinkering" that occurs rather than "total recon­struction."

In any event, such cases are very rare. Where they are most likely to occur is in subject marrers where most of the phenomena are new, and hence arc not fully covered by the preexisting language of everyday life. That is a fair descrip­tion of the "hard sciences." It has lirrle to do with the social sciences and less to do with educational research.

There is an additional reason for this that very often applies to educational research. In that area we are often dealing with terms that have a large affective or perceptual component-terms like anxiety or understanding or appreciation or attitude or perception or personal significance. With such terms, measure­ment using a behavioral test such as the IQ test is not going to capture all of the core of the notion and, indeed, in many cases like that of anxiety, it will not

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144 COMPLEMENTARY METHODS

even capture the main core notion. Because so much of educatio;; is concerned with psychological states of one kind or another, highly resistant and ultimately irreducible to a purely linguistic explication, much of it cannot reasonably be subjected to simple, conceptual redefinition, as in the case of intelligence.

Conclusions for Educational Research

What follows from all this? It follows that most conceptual analysis in edu. cational research has to be done by analyzing and not by replacing the complex concepts. These concepts are usually not reducible in any plausible way to sim. pier replacements, and are too important to be disposable in favor of any such replacements. To explain/predict/control the kind of behavior in which we are interested, we must analyze these concepts as much in terms of their subjective component as of their behavioral or objective (as it is sometimes described) component.

How does one do this? We've provided some hints and examples for consid­eration in the preceding pages. At an introductory level a useful handbook is An Introduction to the Analysis of Educational Concepts ( 1978) by Jonas Soltis. More reading follows this paper, but it may be as well if we mention, right now, one key feature of any successful approach. It is essential that you limit tht amount of analysis to the least amount the job requires. Do more than that, and you're doing philosophy for its own sake. (Enjoy doing more than that, and it's time to change over to philosophy.) Do less, and you'll do worthless research.

Let us take an example from another area for a moment. If you had to give a completely general analysis of the concept of "morally justified" in order to discuss any specific issues in the area of practical ethics, you would never get started. To give a completely general analysis of a very general concept is very, very difficult indeed. Even a "convenient equivalent" is hard to find, especially in philosophy where everything is open to challenge. It is much better to try first to answer the questions: Why do I need this piece of conceptual analysis? At what level of precision? What distinctions am I trying to make? Do I need the wholly general definition, or could I settle for a more limited kind of defi· nition? For example, ifl am going to talk about the morality of abortion or the morality of brainwashing or torture, do I really need a completely general defi· nition of morality, or could I get by with a definition which focuses on a specific type of distinction, for example, the distinction between torture and punish· ment? That would be much easier, and the secret of good conceptual analysis is to try to focus on the area in which you need to do the conceptual clarification before doing it. For example, clarifying the distinction between education and indoctrination is much more manageable than trying to define education (and indoctrination) in the abstract. It's hard enough, but perfectly manageable, and there are excellent discussions of the problem in the literature, by Tony Flew and others; extracts follow this chapter.

Various useful procedures emerge from any study of conceptual clarification and conceptual analysis. One of them is that one should nearly always use what I have called the "method of examples and contrasts;' and not the method of

PHILOSOPIDCAL INQUIRY METHODS 145

explicit definition. That is, yo~ sh~uld try to clarify a noti~n by giving para~ig· rnatic examples; examples wh1ch Illustrate the core meanmg, the most typiCal usc of the term, and examples which illustrate what it is not, when it should not be applied. That approach is a good one, whereas giving an explicit definition

. which allegedly gives you a string of words that can be substituted for the orig· inal concept on all occasions of the use of the original concept rums out to be grossly ov~rambi~ious. After all, it tume~ out no~ to be possi~le even in the physical sc1ences m the very cases where It was sa1d to be best Illustrated. For example, in Newtonian physics, gravity was defined according to the model of reality held by the physicists of the time. As physics matured, models of reality changed and more phenomena related to gravity became "visible" to the physi· cist, causing older definitions to give way to new definitions. We really were not giving a definition which encapsulated the total meaning; we were giving a definition which was practical at a certain stage of the development of science. But lots of residual meaning was omitted and not encapsulated in the original, simple definition. The "method of examples and contrasts" is better able to clarify important distinctions that are appropriate for a particular application, while avoiding the risks of oversimplification inherent in "operational" or arbi· crary definitions.

Ranging a little further in our quest for methodologies for doing conceptual analysis, we find that the general use of analogies and of evocative language, rather than proofs, axiomati:ution, and quantification, is our main concern. Conceptual analysis is not mathematics, though it is no less powerful than math· cmatics-in its own domain, which of course includes establishing the founda· cion of mathematics (or did you think mathematics could establish its own faun· dations?).

Let me illustrate that last point briefly by reference to another kind of case where the methodology involves an approach that is rather similar to the one that ~ am advocating here in talking about philosophical analysis in education. In jurisprudence, that is, in the theory of law-and, indeed, in legal argument in the higher courts at the appeal phase-one does not find very much use of quantification or of the experimental method of hard measurement. One finds a great deal of use of arguments from analogy and the method of examples and contrasts. Once again, when you get to the foundations of a subject, you cannot usc the methodology ifthat subject, since you haven't yet established the legit· imacy of the subject or the methodology. In the same way, only these compara­tively simple and unchallengeable universal tools of conceptual analysis can be used in the conceptual analysis which has to be part of almost any worthwhile project in educational research.

Such subtle arguments from paradigms and analogies are not, therefore, to be thought of in any way as weak sisters (or weak brothers) of hard-core empir­ical research. They provide the foundations on which any worthwhile empirical research must be based-foundations which if not handled with considerable competence and skill will let down the whole structure that is built on them when we do get into the laboratory or out into the field.

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146 COMPLEMENTARY METHODS

So one needs to develop some skills in managing complex arguments from analogy, particularly with respect to establishing the meaning of the terms in­volved, and those skills are often best illustrated in legal reasoning cases. (Sim­iles and metaphors are also often used in conceptual analysis.) Much is made to rest on arguments by analogy

1 and they cannot be converted into deductive

reasoning or a mathematical model. These forms of argument are very sophis­ticated and subtle; they can mislead not only beginners in educational research but also many senior educational researchers who are beginners in this kind of

activity. Much of educational research is dominated by analogies and metaphors, rel-

atively simple conceptions or pictures that drive the direction of thought and experimentation. At the moment, for example, the analogy between the brain and a computer is a dominant theme in the information-processing approach to educational psychology. In the particular area of moral behavior and training, Kohl berg ( 1981) has extensively criticized the weaknesses of a dominant meta­phor-the "bag of tricks" metaphor-which he feels has controlled and misled research in that area. Kohlberg argues that moral reasoning depends on each individual's underlying world view which evolves over time, yielding internally consistent decisions at each stage, but qualitatively different decisions between stages. This is in contrast to the dominant approach to moral training which involves teaching individuals a set of injunctions-the "bag of tricks." The ar­guments over IQ have partly been arguments over whether the mind should be seen as consisting of a few general skills or abilities like skill with the driver, the irons, and the putter in the case of a golfer who can use them to play on any course, or whether it is more like the large collection of special and relatively distinctive skills that make up the repertoire of someone who has degrees in math, French, and sociology.

So arguments by analogy are loose-but powerful and inescapable. One must get to exact theories via loose analogies, and in educational research we very rarely get to exact theories.

There are other tricks of the trade in conceptual analysis which are of great importance to educational research-for example, training in making the most plausible generalizations from particular instances of a phenomenon, and in seeing loopholes or counter-examples in generalizations that have been pro­posed to do just that. No amount of philosophical training in conceptual anal­ysis will substitute for brilliant insights, but it certainly can help in avoiding faulty insights that look brilliant at first. And it can help with getting the best formulation of fairly straightforward generalizations, for these are both logical skills from the analyst's stock in trade. A philosopher trained in conceptual anal­ysis has to critique hundreds of examples of seductive-and often long­believed-but fallacious generalizations or definitions from the history of pop· ular and scientific as well as philosophical thought. And much of philosophical thought is only one step more general in its aims than scientific thought, seeking to provide a theory about very general features of the universe, and about the nature of our species, rather than the special characteristics of the learner or teacher; so the gap is not wide.

PHJLOSOPHICAL INQUIRY METHODS 147

Getting 'fraining in Conceptual Analysis

Where do people get the kind of training whose virtues I have been extolling? In any given year there are many universities whose philosophy deparnnents are conunitted to it, but in a later year, following a power shift within the depart-

. 111ent, one may find the analytical skills downplayed in favor of the study of Buddhism or "system-building'' or "speculative philosophy." The program for graduates and undergraduates may then focus on a different set of skills, if that is what they should be called (I am a skeptic about their legitimacy), skills which do not qualifY as being of much use to the educational researcher or prospective researcher. I've mentioned a good introductory book (Soltis, 1978); if you feel that you need something really basic as an introduction to practical conceptual analysis, you might want to look at a book of mine called Reasoning ( 1977), where I set this out for introductory studies at some length. For advanced work, the Soltis book I just mentioned is good, but you might go beyond it by looking up any books by Israel Scheffier and D. J. O'Connor that are available in your t0callibrary.

There are other sources for training also, depending on the interests of your local college faculty. For example, causation is a notion that is central in all methodologies in educational research and requires serious and difficult concep­rual analysis. Causation is also a key concept within historiography-the study of the methodology of historical studies. It is not usually true that methodolog­ical approaches overlap between the history of education and the experimental approach. However, in this case, a great deal can be learned from the historian who has been trained in conceptual analysis, if your history department has one. The historian rarely has the luxury of large numbers of experiments, never has control groups, and often cannot inspect or interview the people being studied. As a result, historians have developed much more sophisticated techniques for study of the single case than are commonly found in mainline educational re­search. (These, of course, depend on a conceptual analysis of the concept of causation, the kind of analysis we have been stressing here.)

Not just historical studies, but contemporary ones where no manipulation is allowable-the "ethnographic" studies-depend on refinements of causal anal­ysis. These are now common in anthropology and linguistics, for example. Mainline educational researchers often view ethnographic or case-study ap­proaches with considerable suspicion. When you start talking about what such srudies prove, you are, of course, talking about the philosophical question of legitimate inferences from them, a question that cannot be reduced to quanti­tative notions since they are not, in fact, quantitative disciplines. Thus, we come back to philosophy as a source of training once more.

Back to Philosophy

These questions about what the ethnographic and case study approaches prove that is of general interest immediately raise the general question of the payoff from educational research. Is educational research worth doing? And ~at, of course, although it is partly a question of the economics of education, 1.1 also a philosophical question because the payoff from education is surely partly

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148 CO~LRMENTARYMrnTHODS

in terms of quality of life, the value of a positive attitude towards self. These are, of course, philosophical matters. Look at the catalog descriptions of ethics courses or "philosophy of the social sciences" courses to see whether the instruc. tor shows interest in such questions. This kind of philosophical question is not just a question of conceptual analysis; it is what people sometimes call a "sub. stantive" philosophical question. But I consider that term prejudicial, so we will call it "issue- (or problem-) centered" in contrast to conceptual analysis. The study of such issue-centered questions is fundamental to your development as an educational researcher, and can provide an essential basis for deciding the "what" of your research pursuits. Such study is not a substitute for learning to do conceptual analysis, but a necessary complement if you are to bring the rich­ness of philosophy to bear on your educational inquiry.

References

Flew, A. (1972). Indoctrination and doctrines. In I. A. Snook (Ed.), Concepts ofindoctrj. nation: Philosophical essays. Boston: Routledge & :zeegan Paul.

Kohlberg, L. (1981). The philosophy of moral melopment (Vol. 1). San Francisco: Harper and Row.

Morrison, D. E., & Henkel, R. E. (Eds.). (1970). The significance test controvmy: A reader. Hawthorne, NY: De Gruyter Aldine.

Scriven, M. (1977). Reasoning. New York: McGraw-Hill. Soltis, J. (1978). An introduction to the analysis of educational concepts (2d ed.). Reading,

MA: Addison Wesley.

PHILOSOPinCAL INQUIRY METHODS 149

Suggestions for Further Reading

percr, R.S. ( 1973). The philosophy of education. Oxford: Oxford University Press. This anthology, edited by one of the best philosophers of education, covers both conceprual analysis and normative issues like the general problem of the justification of education. Some of the main concepts analyzed here include teaching, learning, quality in education, the work/labor/education distinctions, all of educational rele­vance. It's an excellent set of examples of several authors doing just the kind of thing

-chat most educational researchers need to do more carefully and seriously than they now do.

Thompson, K. ( 1972). Education and philosophy: A practical approach. New York: Blackwell. This inexpensive paperback, in the series "Blackwell's Practical Guides for Teachers," is a single-author philosophical excursion from philosophy into educa­tion. Its great virrue is the usc of the classroom-related examples.

Soltis, J. (1978). An introduction to the analysis of educational concepts (2d ed.). Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. This book is wholly devoted to the critical process. It's easily available, inexpensive, comprehensive, and actually worth reading twice (as the author suggests on p. 106), an undertaking facilitated by its commendable brevity. If you wane to put a roe in the water of conceprual analysis, this book will be your best choice; but remember that the other books are necessary in order to avoid any incli­nation to think of the area as having a monolithic and uncontroversial structure. This is still philosophy, not mathematics; which :s not to say that there are no right an­swers, only that they are not, for the most part, Yes or No answers.

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150 COMPLRMENTARYMrnTHODS

Study Questions

l. There is a close association between philosophy and education in the his­tory of thought. Plato, Rousseau, Dewey, and Russell all contributed to both fields. Name (discover) four other philosophers of note _whose contribution to education has been substantial-two of them from the 20th century.

2. Philosophy has other contributions to make to education besides its ana­lytic techniques, e.g., in its substanti~e results about alternative possible foun­dations for ethics, which bear on the content of moral education. Give another example of a substantive area in philosophy where the results bear on education e.g., in terms of curriculum content. '

3. People often think anyone can do conceptual analysis without training. On the contrary, even very distinguished researchers make blunders that invali­date large slices of their work; e.g., much work on teaching identifies it with the transfer of knowledge (which omits the transfer of attitudes). Teaching can­not be defined as the transfer of knowledge and attitudes either, for two very, very important reasons. Can you work out what they are?

4. The idea that a test may be better than the judges whose judgment the test is built to match is at first sight a little paradoxical, unless you are pretty familiar with the testing and measurement literature. Another extremely important ex­ample is provided by multiple-choice tests used to measure essay-writing ability. It is often said of certain such tests that they are better measures of essay-writing ability than an essay-writing test. How can this make sense?

5. Suppose you wanted to do some useful research on college teaching. Where would (a) conceptual analysis and (b) other philosophical questions come into your overall research plan?

6. An earlier study question asked for two reasons why teaching can't be identified with the transfer of knowledge and attitudes. The first reason is that such transfer also occurs during brainwashing which is not part of what you'd want to include under teaching; and the second reason is that teaching is the name of an activity, one that is not necessarily always completely successful­hence, teaching may be occurring at times when no learning is occurring (hence, no transfer). Maybe those two counter-examples to the proposed definition of teaching do not wholly persuade you. They are very carefully chosen so as not to be too easy or obvious-but they are correct. If you don't think so, you flunked the first question in the Scriven Conceptual Analysis Test (SCAT). You should read the anthology Concepts of Intkctrinatwn: Philosophical Essays edited by I. A. Snook, and either concede and explain your error or publish a refuta·

PHILOSOPIDCAL INQUIRY METHODS 151

. 0

of-the SCAT, which of course is wholly unconnected with any empirical ~dation data. (That's the great charm of conceprual analysis; but also the great traP for would-be players.)

The remainder of Section III of this book provides additional study ques­·ons and associated readings which will further clarify and apply the concepts ~scussed in this chapter. .

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